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| A Mother of a Day |
| Each year for the last five, I have added an accessory to our garden as a Mother's Day gift to myself. I sincerely suggest that you do the same (yes, Father's Day will work, too) and here's why. First, because I don't have the oomph to decorate the whole garden at once. I could shop for weeks and never be sure there was something I could live with longterm. Instead, and to train myself to commit to my own style, quirky as it is, I make myself go for one thing I see that lights me up right then. By focusing the annual ritual at Mother's Day, I have another reason to love them forever, and to remember one of the essential truths of parenting. Each year of a child's life is different, and each should excite you and them right then - carpe diem as applied to the moments you'll miss if you blink while they're growing up. Some of the memories seem truly corny later on - like the iron bell shaped like a pig of four Mother's Days ago. But it was a silly hoot at the time, like staying up too late fashioning an Uncle Sam suit out of paper bags, and reminds me of a year when corny seemed cool. The garden ornaments are also 3d snapshots of the annual festival of stuff available to adorn our already adorable gardens. Besides the pig bell, I have acquired a concrete bowl of fruit, a pair of teal blue metal chairs, a copper spinning thing, a huge pot with iguanas on it, and just today, a concrete tiger cub statue. I warned you my style is quirky. How it all goes together is another, never-ending story... |
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| The why's of living - beyond the garden |
Check this page for an assortment of info I just must pass along to you. Some will be political, some cultural, sometimes I'll simply make a point that needs to be made. If you like these pieces, let me know.
end of July 03
I've not worked on this page for awhile. I think when the war started, I just got disheartened. The idea that I would have anything of value to pass along about life in general...my generation of boomers seems to have delivered a world so dichotomous it has to be lived to be believed. I sit in my air conditioned living room writing this piece on a laptop computer and send it to my site via a wireless network. At the very same moment, there are more American troops deployed in more dangerous places than I remember there being in many years. The boomers have sent up two disappointing Presidents thus far. We tried a D, and got burned so badly many voted for an R for the first time in their lives, or turned to Nader the I as a last ditch hope of making a statement of some sort. For whatever reasons, the previous D and the current R have more in common than I would have imagined. My observation is simple and actually predates them both. I am not an isolationist person, but a basic one. If we haven't taken care of our basics, we can't reach out to save the world without seeming either hypocritical at the least or stretching our resources so thin til we can't do the basics in the worst case scenario. We would, as a nation, have more to offer if we were truly strong at home. Those who say we are fine here, and so should make sure other nations have freedom haven't seen what I've seen of our own country. It is the greatest nation in the world in spite of some of its most egregious policies. Neither the previous D nor the current R takes advantage of that bully pulpit enough to see to the needs of the people; if people are unable to live and raise families on the wages they can realistically earn, we are all needy. And unless we take care of ourselves first, how can we give to the world? |
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